> The UK Foreign Office told the BBC it was "closely monitoring reports that members of the Uyghur diaspora in the UK have been harassed by the Chinese authorities", and that it had "raised our concerns directly with the Chinese embassy in London".
I've always wondered, how is it not against the law to act on a foreign government's orders to harass citizens? We know that certain academics are getting arrested, but mainly for spying, IP theft and lying, at least in the US.
But I've never seen reports of arrests made on those grounds. It's a well known fact that "students" will show up at universities to check on other Chinese citizens and dissidents. Yet nothing happens.
Primarily because very light harrassment isn't generally illegal and won't typically get you arrested. You'll be hard-pressed to get someone to care about that. The Beijing reps are surely careful about the extent of it, about not going too far, in most cases. Since the target likely knows who they represent, they don't have to press too far, they just have to make their presence known and it's enough to terrify without any specific act of violence or threat occurring (which limits what the police & co. can or will do). And last but not least, does the target want to ramp things up further with Beijing by pursuing it criminally, trying to get a restraining order, and so on. If the target succeeds, Beijing can just send more. It's lose, lose, lose, every direction you turn when a superpower has marked you and you lack any consequential power.
Much like the IRS trying to battle the Church of Scientology, they have an army of followers willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause. How do you fight that, other than for the Feds to get involved and start removing these people from the US by the hundreds. It wouldn't surprise me if the Feds just follow & watch on purpose for intel acquisition purposes.
> how is it not against the law to act on a foreign government's orders to harass citizens?
When you consider that until very recently, it was legal for NYPD officers to have sex with people in their custody, and indeed, in many places it is still legal for police to coerce sex from people in their custody, you'll realize that law is reactionary and until it becomes a problem that catches a politician's eye, it won't be illegal.
On the contrary, they're both things that should obviously be illegal.
The question is why aren't things that should obviously be illegal not actually illegal. I answered that question. However, it seems like some people reflexively support the police so they don't read past the surface.
I’m curious: looking at your posting history, are you at least being paid to astroturf pro-CCP propaganda, or do you do it for free? Could you give us some insight into how it works?
The western countries are accusing China of fake genocide here, such as suppressing the Uyghur culture, their language, their food, their clothing, even their haircuts.
But yet, H&M is a western brand, that sells jeans and T-shirt, which are western style clothes.
So, if the Uyghurs are buying and wearing H&M clothes, instead of traditional Uyghur clothes, then they are in effect genociding themselves.
So therefore, H&M and the West, are in effect, helping to genocide Uyghur culture.
The funny thing also, is that one of the most famous Chinese actresses right now, is Dilraba Dilmurat, of the Uyghur ethnicity. And she is rising in stardom in the Chinese entertainment world.
So if the Chinese are really trying to genocide the Uyghurs, then I highly doubt they’d let a Uyghur girl rise up too far in their entertainment culture.
Can you imagine the Nazis promoting Jews in their films? That is the analogy here.
Han Chinese reproduce like rabbits and CCP sends them to Tibet, Xinjiang to erase local culture. Those are the people who buy in H&M. Its irrelevant that there is one actress who is popular. If CCP wants it can disappear or put them in concentration camp. Its like saying you have a black friend and therefore not racist.
] The western countries are accusing China of fake genocide here, such as suppressing the Uyghur culture, their language, their food, their clothing, even their haircuts
First of all, that's not a fake genocide. Forced cultural assimilation is still considered genocide.
Second, the accusations are far more serious - concentration camps with various human rights abuses. That's in classic genocide territory, going as far as the Herrero and Namaqua one.
> The funny thing also, is that one of the most famous Chinese actresses right now, is Dilraba Dilmurat, of the Uyghur ethnicity. And she is rising in stardom in the Chinese entertainment world.
> So if the Chinese are really trying to genocide the Uyghurs, then I highly doubt they’d let a Uyghur girl rise up too far in their entertainment culture.
> Can you imagine the Nazis promoting Jews in their films? That is the analogy here
The comparison isn't apt, because the Chinese don't claim Uyghurs are enemies of the people or w/e, just that their culture is terrorist. They're doing cultural assimilation, not mass extermination ( mostly). So a culturally assimilated actress is a perfect tool - see, they're not all bad, it's not in their blood/race!
> Forced cultural assimilation is still considered genocide.
Interesting point of view there. You sure you want to die on this hill?
Ok, let’s take that a step further.
In the Western countries, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe, they all force their immigrants to culturally assimilate. They do this by socially shaming the immigrants to adopt local names, and to not speak their own native language.
This is very prevalent in the white countries, where white people scream out: “Why don’t you speak English, and learn our culture!”
And in grade schools, the immigrants are mocked for being foreign.
And what does the government do about this? Nothing. They turn a blind eye. They let society handle the cultural genocide for them. I’m sorry, to use your phrase: the forced cultural assimilation.
This is their technique. And it allows them to have a plausible deniability to the situation.
Hell, even in the western countries, women are banned from wearing their burqas and facial veils.
And then, speaking of concentration camps, then don’t you agree that the United States had their own concentration camps when they arrested all the Japanese and threw them into the American Concentration Camps? This was only 70 years ago, so it’s not very far back in American history.
And furthermore, the United States and the other western countries, have their own techniques of genociding foreign culture. They do this through Hollywood, by casting Asian males as weirdly foreign, incompetent, and ignorant to the western ways. If this is not cultural genocide, per your own definition, then I don’t know what is.
I'm not sure i want to engage it shitty whataboutism, but here it goes:
> Hell, even in the western countries, women are banned from wearing their burqas and facial veils.
It's not about assimilation of a foreign culture, it's about an unacceptable practice part of a foreign culture. Similar to genital mutilation which is accepted in some cultures and religions, but really shouldn't be and that's why it's forbidden in some places. You can practice your culture all you want, but you can't show everyone that you treat women like shit because your holy book said so 2 millennia ago.
> And then, speaking of concentration camps, then don’t you agree that the United States had their own concentration camps when they arrested all the Japanese and threw them into the American Concentration Camps? This was only 70 years ago, so it’s not very far back in American history.
There are people as stupid as this? Yes, Japanese internment in the US is the US putting people in concentration camp based on racial profiling, and was terrible, and probably illegal.
> This is very prevalent in the white countries, where white people scream out: “Why don’t you speak English, and learn our culture!”
Yes, white=English, it's obvious how basic your argument is.
> They do this by socially shaming the immigrants to adopt local names, and to not speak their own native language.
> And in grade schools, the immigrants are mocked for being foreign.
You can't generalise like this. I'm living in "white" ( i fucking hate using that term, it's useless ) France, and it's really not the case.
> And furthermore, the United States and the other western countries, have their own techniques of genociding foreign culture. They do this through Hollywood, by casting Asian males as weirdly foreign, incompetent, and ignorant to the western ways. If this is not cultural genocide, per your own definition, then I don’t know what is.
> In the Western countries, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe, they all force their immigrants to culturally assimilate. They do this by socially shaming the immigrants to adopt local names, and to not speak their own native language.This is very prevalent in the white countries, where white people scream out: “Why don’t you speak English, and learn our culture!”
This happens by a sub group of Conservative regressive minority of the population. It is not government sanctioned and in most of the countries you mentioned not supported by the majority of the public opinion. These are exceptions not the rule.
> And in grade schools, the immigrants are mocked for being foreign.
You're comparing the behavior of petulant children against government policy of the CPC? Apt, I suppose, if that's the standard you hold them to.
Frankly I don't think anyone in power particularly cares if the Chinese exterminate a few million people as long as they do it inside their own borders. One does well to remember that the Western world wouldn't have done anything about the Nazi Holocaust if Germany hadn't invaded Poland and France.
Look up almost any genocide or mass killing of the 20th century, even the late 20th century, and see how nobody outside the area gave a damn.
Pre-WW2, you've got millions exterminated in the Congo Free State. The Ottoman Empire killed a million Armenians, 500,000 Greeks, 400,000 Assyrians. The British starved five million Indians to death in 1900 and two million Bengalis in 1943 and nobody gave a single solitary shit.
Post WW2 it gets worse. Two million people in Cambodia, 700,000 people in Indonesia, 550,000 in Rwanda, 500,000 in Angola, millions in China during the Cultural Revolution, 225,000 in Bosnia, 300,000 in Uganda, a million Bangladeshis in 1971.
The list goes on and on and on and the fraction that prompted any kind of forceful international response is pathetically small.
The measures that are making the news now didn't really reach their peak until Xi was in power. Also, the Chinese are known to flood with ethnic Han people recalcitrant territories they conquered.
All this has been used by the Soviet Union before and I'm sure we can find a guide book on suppressing satellite states in some KGB archive or perhaps in Germany (copy lent to their friends in stasi). It sounds to me that the Chinese are using this here.
Congo - when the atrocities came out, the king was forced to cede it to Belgium and the terror more or less stopped.
The Ottoman genocides were during the Great War, and even their allies ( Germany ) were concerned and issued proclamations, let alone their enemies ( Russia) which used it for recruitment.
Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia ended with wars/peacekeepers to topple the genocidal governments.
it depended on the political spectrum. Initially everybody thougth internaments were some kind of forced labour schemes not an extermination plan (Europe still had some conservative views on human rigths of non whites at the time)
Well they were, it wasn't until 1942 that the first mass extermination camps were opened.
And it was not whites vs X, it was Aryans vs "subhuman" "races". Jews and Slavs are as white as "pure" Germans were, yet were considered subhuman and for extermination. And anti-Semitism in general was wildly popular in many parts of the world, including Europe and the US.
The allies were well aware about the genocide even before 1942 from escapees reports, the Polish underground and reconnaissance and bombing missions.
From 1942 to 1943 British intelligence intercepted and decoded radio messages , which included daily prisoner returns and death tolls for ten concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
Most of the world knew very well the Jews were getting murdered en masse and forcefully resettled ( many of them tried to escape and were refused asylum including in the US, and brought their stories). Some resistance movements also brought detailed information.
In 1943, the Allies had all the grim details of Auschwitz with the Pilecki report, which was written by a man who voluntarily went undercover there and then escaped to tell the story.
True, which is why the politicians(including us consumers) all turn our blind eyes on those victims inside China, if everything can be CONTAINED and remains INSIDE, however they FAILED(purposely or not) with COVID
with this pandemic today everything has begin to change for better or worst
How did the Chinese fail to contain Covid, when serological tests showed that the virus was already present in the United States, in Seattle, back in December 2019?
We still don’t know if it was in the United States earlier than this, because the American authorities refuse to investigate it.
And it was already present in Europe, in Italy and Spain, in November 2019. So it was detected in Europe, after the fact, before it was even known in China.
So, given this information, how is this China’s fault, when they themselves discovered and isolated the virus in December 2019?
Can you please use some mental gymnastics here to help us all understand how this is all China’s fault?
What if instead, the virus came in from elsewhere, but China got hit the hardest first, but their disease tracking system was the first to actually detect the virus? Because apparently, the rest of the western countries all failed to detect it.
The virus most likely came from a bat via another animal, and that's highly unlikely to have happened in any of the countries you mentioned. And considering how China responded to the outbreak in Wuhan, it's absolutely certain they won't be forthcoming to disclose previous outbreaks if they find evidence about them ( like the US and some European countries did)
This is just conjecture. You have no evidence to support this.
And there are bats in Austin, Texas! You’re saying that the bats in Austin are clean, and disease free, while the bats in China, somehow only carry the virus?
As long as local politics is so successfully muddied by national chauvinist bigots/populists there's not much chance of a coordinated foreign policy to try to do something about it.
Though the current US-EU sanctions on Xinjiang is quite an unexpected development. (Also might not really mean much.)
It's a shame, I feel like it's our duty to boost these things - it's the least we can do.
Maybe the HN team could manually do "flag locks" for certain articles that are being brigaded?
Reddit has a "controversial" indicator on posts and comments that can help users identify that this is happening(heavily downvoted, but also heavily upvoted and interacted with).
This is way beyond being "controversial". First thing probably, HN team can investigate all China related posts and gather users who flagged these posts and take action accordingly.
If there were a way to transparently share coordinated activity I'd be supportive. But, I've never seen the evidence shared and I trust the reason is because sharing such evidence would lead the actors to change their methods. The best we can do as users is discuss the possibility it may be occurring.
If this is being flagged, it's likely because it's against the submission guidelines. It's hard to see how this gratifies intellectual curiosity, and it's a political topic without an interesting new phenomenon.
I don't recall ever flagging a submission, if I have it's infrequent.
That personal attack aside, political submissions don't have a blanket ban, but it's reasonable to see why this one would get flagged without blaming paid state actors.
you need some amount of points in order to downvote something on this site; only someone who has a stake in this community can yield his influence in order to downvote something here; this means that a lot of people here are subjects to the whims of the CPC.
That's not participation, that's violating community protocols. Downvote is not used to show that you disagree but that the reply is low effort, inflammatory etc.
Flagging is for guideline-breaking content and a sufficient number of flags suppresses visibility except for people who have showdead on.
Whereas upvotes and downvotes control the sort order without silencing anyone, reflecting (albeit noisily) the overall community sentiment. Voting based on agreement is a perfectly valid way to use HN, and it seems to be what the majority is doing. (At least judging from the votes on my own comments, where I can see the count.)
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and badly—badly enough to ban your account. I'm not going to ban your account for this comment, but please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this going forward.
It's very likely that economic sanctions will cause more harm to the Chinese than the harm done to the Uyghurs, and has a poor record of it's intended regime change. They are not a solution to a humanitarian crisis.
It's intention is not regime change. It's directly making slave labor unprofitable. Sure it's a whack-a-mole of sorts, but it at least makes things clear for everyone involved.
So usually Joe Rando does not care when he is shopping, but at least he can't and doesn't fund more labor camps indirectly.
That only works if sanctions apply to slave labor, but not to comparable non-slave-labor. Sanctions based on geographic region ("Made in China"/"Made in Xinjiang") ethnicity ("Made by Uyghurs") or product category (cotton) can't achieve that, because they don't apply differential pressure that allows non-enslaving businesses to outcompete enslaving ones (and then hire former slaves as free workers), they affect both equally.
To make differential pressure work, the first step is knowing who you're dealing with, which means having dedicated inspection teams working their way down supply chains to record labor conditions on the ground. Once you do have that information, highly targeted sanctions can be used to force change.
Helping other countries may be a good thing (although the Vietnamese government's human rights record isn't that great) but it doesn't offer a way out to current victims of forced labor, who can't just move to another country to benefit from the improved conditions there. Do you think they'd just get released once exploiting them becomes unprofitable? That would put a bunch of angry unemployed people on the streets, so the security services are unlikely to be in favor. The most likely path forward would be gradually transferring them into regular work, which works best if such work is available, i.e. there's no blanket ban making everything equally unprofitable.
Usually sanctioned countries have quite a lot of room for domestic economic growth, most obstacles are internal inefficiencies (like human rights abuses, inefficient ideology based policies), and naturally since the sanctions are a direct result of some alleged problem, as the problem is getting addressed the sanctions can be too. Diplomacy never rests.
At the cost of making a billion non-slave laborers also unprofitable. Sure, removing that billion from the labor pool may help other workers, but that's a huge sacrifice.
Economic sanctions should aim at the top of Chinese society. Magnitsky type sanctions on officials. Things like preventing every political official or wealthy businessman and their family from travel, going to western universities and all these things they are now used to (and which they wouldn’t be happy to lose).
>Economic sanctions should aim at the top of Chinese society. Magnitsky type sanctions on officials.
Though an improvement over blanket sanctions, I suspect the rich would use it as an excuse to squeeze more out of the poor.
Additionally, I doubt the widespread abandonment of due process will truly make the people more friendly towards the West. You'd be targeting potentially millions, and any borderline case is a PR disaster. Imagine something like "mailman for forty years loses savings due to US attack."
> Cool, China just spent $1 on me or is it 10 cents. What’s the going rate?
With the current rampant nationalism in China - likely nothing. They created a self protecting system. Especially with introduction of the social credits.
The answer is war. It's really that simple. Do we want to bear that cost? Personally my answer is please God no, but that doesn't mean war isn't the only real option.
The CCP are quite image conscious. All people are really asking is that they treat the Uighurs in a normal manner rather than trying to overthrow the CCP.
The CCp is not image conscious. That's honestly a totally asinine statement. That's like saying a mafia boss is image conscious because he threatens to murder anyone who speaks out about his crimes. And speak for yourself, I would like few political things more than to see the ccp overthrown and a bunch of apparatchiks hanged from the forbidden palace.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/nationalistic/ideological/racial/whatever-this-is battle. We ban such accounts regardless of what they're battling for or against because it destroys the curious conversation this site is supposed to be for. Please don't create accounts to do that with.
You must be joking as this kind of war would be WW3 and the end of life. We need to sanction the shit out of the people closest to the problem and get the UN out there to investigate.
I have no doubt it would be carnage unlike the world has ever seen. But honestly the real joke is expecting the UN to be able to do anything meaningful. This is an organization that is so politically impotent they can't even stop genocides in places like Sub saharan africa, like they will be able to do anything against a premier world power that sits on the permanent security council. No one likes it but war is a serious answer, calling for UN investigations, well you might as well throw a bottle in the ocean and hope someone in a landlocked country gets your message.
Occurrence of war based on fake allegations isn't rare in our history. We now have enough motivation to have a war against China and human rights isn't one of them. It's all about power and that's why there is so much focus on media about it.
Why nobody talks about KSA/Saudis? We have strong proof for all the terrible things they have done and they are still our dear partner. It's all BS if you ask me. Everything is about power and interest.
Travel to China and see what they are doing. China isn't an utopia, but most of the Chinese are happy about their progress. They complain about lack of freedom of speech but they also celebrate their victory in ending extreme poverty. They also have a lot of respect for western values unlike what politicians are trying to make you believe. It's pretty significant that they have order with a population of over 1.4 billion, most of whom were not educated.
The first thing to do is to consider whether you would want to support the Olympics in 2021. Are you going to buy the products of the sponsors? Should the sponsors be called out on their support for genocide?
The IOC claims the olympics is not about politics, which means they dont want to discuss the issue. However this is not a political issue. It is a human rights issue.
An unpopular answer: we can't do anything. This is about maturity of the mankind. Long ago it was expected to eat your enemies "to gain their power". Now it's labor camps for enemies of the state. Soon labor camps will be replaced by exile on remote islands (just like brits sent people they didn't like to australia). In distant future we'll just ignore the outcasts.
Stop buying things from China - look for alternatives. Next time you buy something major look into where it is sourced. If there is something you buy a lot of from China look for an alternative.
> According to UN estimates, China has detained more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslims in camps in Xinjiang. The Chinese state has been accused of an array of abuses there including forced labour, sterilisation, torture, rape, and genocide.
I'm interested in how CCP managed to arrest and put more than 1 million uyghurs into reeducation camp. I found that population of Xinjiang is only 25 millions. It is unbelievable that 4% of people were put into something like a jail.
Doing business with China in 2021 will look like doing business with Germany in 1938. Profits were more important than Tibet, Hong Kong and the Uyghurs - profits will be more important than Taiwan. Maybe we’ll stop doing business with genocidal communists if they attack Japan? One can hope.
Tbh, the article doesn't tell anything unusual. CCP rules by fear and a necessary part of such systems are labor camps. They aren't 731/nazi level evil, but they are still fairly cruel.
i am afraid that they are the future: a significant part of the world is moving towards a more authoritarian model of government. (for example much of eastern Europe and Turkey has authoritarian rulers, also see all these censorship rules on twitter and faceboook). Maybe COVID is just a trigger that will cause a larger shift towards this abyss.
i personally have come to see cryptocurrencies as a means to escape this trend; here you have a tool that escapes that big machinery of government - never mind the electricity that is wasted along the way; i think that the altenative of a GULAG is much worse, in terms of trade-offs.
> for example much of eastern Europe and Turkey has authoritarian rulers, also see all these censorship rules on twitter and faceboook
Hungary is usually considered Central Europe, and they're the only ones i can think of besides Poland and Belarus. Maybe Serbia if you're being generous?
That's far from "much of Eastern Europe ( there are 10 countries in the Balkans only).
No, Hungary is in Central Europe, and has barely 10 million people, less than Romania at 20, Ukraine at 44.
Russia and Poland are indeed in Eastern Europe ( Russia partially), and Poland is indeed one of the biggest countries (37 million) in that part of Europe, but still has less inhabitants than the Balkans or Ukraine which certainly lack traditional autocratic governments.
the population of Russia is about 150 millions; I still think that Russia is part of Europe - in terms of its culture. Europe would have looked very different, if it weren't for the sacrifice of the Russian people during world war II. I think that would make up for any discrepancies.
I wonder if the CCP will similarly re-educate the people of Taiwan. Dont they have a 9 year timeline to invade it? We should look for a new place to build our chip fabs...
All: these threads have all become the same hellish flamewar, endlessly repeated. Anything this flamey and/or repetitive is off topic here. HN is for thoughtful, curious conversation, not smiting enemies: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please see these recent explanations:
A: Sure—more important than most of what's on HN. That doesn't mean that HN's rules stop applying or that flamewar becomes ok. Also, people angrily yelling on the internet has nothing to do with helping oppressed peoples. It is about activated tribal emotion, and in that sense belongs to the problem rather than any step toward solution.
Q: Are you secretly a spy, Chinese agent, communist, astroturfer, racist, or sympathizer thereof?
A: No; see step 4 of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck. The idea of HN has always [1] been to avoid becoming scorched earth [2] or at least to stave off that fate for a while longer [3]. Scorched earth is not interesting, and threads like these are unfortunately a fast road to hell.
I am genuinely curious (even though this may not be the best place to ask) : are you the only mod running around trying to keep HN in one piece or are there more (also because you often say "we" (banned, warned,etc.))
131 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadI've always wondered, how is it not against the law to act on a foreign government's orders to harass citizens? We know that certain academics are getting arrested, but mainly for spying, IP theft and lying, at least in the US.
But I've never seen reports of arrests made on those grounds. It's a well known fact that "students" will show up at universities to check on other Chinese citizens and dissidents. Yet nothing happens.
Much like the IRS trying to battle the Church of Scientology, they have an army of followers willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause. How do you fight that, other than for the Feds to get involved and start removing these people from the US by the hundreds. It wouldn't surprise me if the Feds just follow & watch on purpose for intel acquisition purposes.
When you consider that until very recently, it was legal for NYPD officers to have sex with people in their custody, and indeed, in many places it is still legal for police to coerce sex from people in their custody, you'll realize that law is reactionary and until it becomes a problem that catches a politician's eye, it won't be illegal.
That has nothing to do with the subject.
The question is why aren't things that should obviously be illegal not actually illegal. I answered that question. However, it seems like some people reflexively support the police so they don't read past the surface.
No it's not.
In the past, it was lumped in with the right of cops to have sex with suspect, thus it was intentional to allow cops to catch sex workers.
Calling it a glitch only shows how little people care about that particular problem and in fact reinforces my argument.
I'm curious, who were they selling to? The Uyghurs that are being genocided or the Han Chinese doing the genociding?
Otherwise, we will have mob rule.
If you'd like more explanation, there is plenty at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363 and the links back from there.
The western countries are accusing China of fake genocide here, such as suppressing the Uyghur culture, their language, their food, their clothing, even their haircuts.
But yet, H&M is a western brand, that sells jeans and T-shirt, which are western style clothes.
So, if the Uyghurs are buying and wearing H&M clothes, instead of traditional Uyghur clothes, then they are in effect genociding themselves.
So therefore, H&M and the West, are in effect, helping to genocide Uyghur culture.
The funny thing also, is that one of the most famous Chinese actresses right now, is Dilraba Dilmurat, of the Uyghur ethnicity. And she is rising in stardom in the Chinese entertainment world.
So if the Chinese are really trying to genocide the Uyghurs, then I highly doubt they’d let a Uyghur girl rise up too far in their entertainment culture.
Can you imagine the Nazis promoting Jews in their films? That is the analogy here.
Something to think about.
First of all, that's not a fake genocide. Forced cultural assimilation is still considered genocide.
Second, the accusations are far more serious - concentration camps with various human rights abuses. That's in classic genocide territory, going as far as the Herrero and Namaqua one.
> The funny thing also, is that one of the most famous Chinese actresses right now, is Dilraba Dilmurat, of the Uyghur ethnicity. And she is rising in stardom in the Chinese entertainment world.
> So if the Chinese are really trying to genocide the Uyghurs, then I highly doubt they’d let a Uyghur girl rise up too far in their entertainment culture.
> Can you imagine the Nazis promoting Jews in their films? That is the analogy here
The comparison isn't apt, because the Chinese don't claim Uyghurs are enemies of the people or w/e, just that their culture is terrorist. They're doing cultural assimilation, not mass extermination ( mostly). So a culturally assimilated actress is a perfect tool - see, they're not all bad, it's not in their blood/race!
Interesting point of view there. You sure you want to die on this hill?
Ok, let’s take that a step further.
In the Western countries, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe, they all force their immigrants to culturally assimilate. They do this by socially shaming the immigrants to adopt local names, and to not speak their own native language.
This is very prevalent in the white countries, where white people scream out: “Why don’t you speak English, and learn our culture!”
And in grade schools, the immigrants are mocked for being foreign.
And what does the government do about this? Nothing. They turn a blind eye. They let society handle the cultural genocide for them. I’m sorry, to use your phrase: the forced cultural assimilation.
This is their technique. And it allows them to have a plausible deniability to the situation.
Hell, even in the western countries, women are banned from wearing their burqas and facial veils.
And then, speaking of concentration camps, then don’t you agree that the United States had their own concentration camps when they arrested all the Japanese and threw them into the American Concentration Camps? This was only 70 years ago, so it’s not very far back in American history.
And furthermore, the United States and the other western countries, have their own techniques of genociding foreign culture. They do this through Hollywood, by casting Asian males as weirdly foreign, incompetent, and ignorant to the western ways. If this is not cultural genocide, per your own definition, then I don’t know what is.
> Hell, even in the western countries, women are banned from wearing their burqas and facial veils.
It's not about assimilation of a foreign culture, it's about an unacceptable practice part of a foreign culture. Similar to genital mutilation which is accepted in some cultures and religions, but really shouldn't be and that's why it's forbidden in some places. You can practice your culture all you want, but you can't show everyone that you treat women like shit because your holy book said so 2 millennia ago.
> And then, speaking of concentration camps, then don’t you agree that the United States had their own concentration camps when they arrested all the Japanese and threw them into the American Concentration Camps? This was only 70 years ago, so it’s not very far back in American history.
There are people as stupid as this? Yes, Japanese internment in the US is the US putting people in concentration camp based on racial profiling, and was terrible, and probably illegal.
> This is very prevalent in the white countries, where white people scream out: “Why don’t you speak English, and learn our culture!”
Yes, white=English, it's obvious how basic your argument is.
> They do this by socially shaming the immigrants to adopt local names, and to not speak their own native language. > And in grade schools, the immigrants are mocked for being foreign.
You can't generalise like this. I'm living in "white" ( i fucking hate using that term, it's useless ) France, and it's really not the case.
> And furthermore, the United States and the other western countries, have their own techniques of genociding foreign culture. They do this through Hollywood, by casting Asian males as weirdly foreign, incompetent, and ignorant to the western ways. If this is not cultural genocide, per your own definition, then I don’t know what is.
Yes, every western country does Hollywood.
This happens by a sub group of Conservative regressive minority of the population. It is not government sanctioned and in most of the countries you mentioned not supported by the majority of the public opinion. These are exceptions not the rule.
> And in grade schools, the immigrants are mocked for being foreign.
You're comparing the behavior of petulant children against government policy of the CPC? Apt, I suppose, if that's the standard you hold them to.
"She accused him of rape, but then the next day had sex with someone she met at a bar. So which is it?"
That is the logical equivalent of your post.
I simply cannot believe that you would not be able to tell the difference being an issue of CONSENT and AGENCY.
H&M is not FORCING anyone to adopt western cultural standards or abandon their heritage.
The CPC is.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
If you'd like more explanation, there is plenty at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363 and the links back from there.
Pre-WW2, you've got millions exterminated in the Congo Free State. The Ottoman Empire killed a million Armenians, 500,000 Greeks, 400,000 Assyrians. The British starved five million Indians to death in 1900 and two million Bengalis in 1943 and nobody gave a single solitary shit.
Post WW2 it gets worse. Two million people in Cambodia, 700,000 people in Indonesia, 550,000 in Rwanda, 500,000 in Angola, millions in China during the Cultural Revolution, 225,000 in Bosnia, 300,000 in Uganda, a million Bangladeshis in 1971.
The list goes on and on and on and the fraction that prompted any kind of forceful international response is pathetically small.
Congo - when the atrocities came out, the king was forced to cede it to Belgium and the terror more or less stopped.
The Ottoman genocides were during the Great War, and even their allies ( Germany ) were concerned and issued proclamations, let alone their enemies ( Russia) which used it for recruitment.
Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia ended with wars/peacekeepers to topple the genocidal governments.
And it was not whites vs X, it was Aryans vs "subhuman" "races". Jews and Slavs are as white as "pure" Germans were, yet were considered subhuman and for extermination. And anti-Semitism in general was wildly popular in many parts of the world, including Europe and the US.
From 1942 to 1943 British intelligence intercepted and decoded radio messages , which included daily prisoner returns and death tolls for ten concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
Most of the world knew very well the Jews were getting murdered en masse and forcefully resettled ( many of them tried to escape and were refused asylum including in the US, and brought their stories). Some resistance movements also brought detailed information.
In 1943, the Allies had all the grim details of Auschwitz with the Pilecki report, which was written by a man who voluntarily went undercover there and then escaped to tell the story.
True, which is why the politicians(including us consumers) all turn our blind eyes on those victims inside China, if everything can be CONTAINED and remains INSIDE, however they FAILED(purposely or not) with COVID
with this pandemic today everything has begin to change for better or worst
We still don’t know if it was in the United States earlier than this, because the American authorities refuse to investigate it.
And it was already present in Europe, in Italy and Spain, in November 2019. So it was detected in Europe, after the fact, before it was even known in China.
So, given this information, how is this China’s fault, when they themselves discovered and isolated the virus in December 2019?
Can you please use some mental gymnastics here to help us all understand how this is all China’s fault?
What if instead, the virus came in from elsewhere, but China got hit the hardest first, but their disease tracking system was the first to actually detect the virus? Because apparently, the rest of the western countries all failed to detect it.
And there are bats in Austin, Texas! You’re saying that the bats in Austin are clean, and disease free, while the bats in China, somehow only carry the virus?
But you're right that typically, it's considered no one else's business what countries do inside their borders.
Though the current US-EU sanctions on Xinjiang is quite an unexpected development. (Also might not really mean much.)
I'm sure there would have been sanctions and the like.
Quick link : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
They also flag posts to take down from the first page. Just look how many votes do this post have but barely on the first page, about to fall down.
Maybe the HN team could manually do "flag locks" for certain articles that are being brigaded?
Reddit has a "controversial" indicator on posts and comments that can help users identify that this is happening(heavily downvoted, but also heavily upvoted and interacted with).
That personal attack aside, political submissions don't have a blanket ban, but it's reasonable to see why this one would get flagged without blaming paid state actors.
If you'd like more explanation, there is plenty at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363 and the links back from there.
lol
Whereas upvotes and downvotes control the sort order without silencing anyone, reflecting (albeit noisily) the overall community sentiment. Voting based on agreement is a perfectly valid way to use HN, and it seems to be what the majority is doing. (At least judging from the votes on my own comments, where I can see the count.)
If you'd like more explanation, there is plenty at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363 and the links back from there.
Edit: we had to warn you about this before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26549570). Continuing to break the rules like this will get your account banned. (Btw, if you or anyone think I might be posting this because I'm secretly a communist, foreign agent, or $x-sympathizer, please see step 4 of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365.)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and badly—badly enough to ban your account. I'm not going to ban your account for this comment, but please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this going forward.
Anyone have ideas? What is the solution?
Will the West do it? Not for Uyghurs. They didn’t do it for Tibetans nor for Hong Kong, they’re not going to do it for Uyghurs.
However, given the increasing brazenness of China, I won’t be surprised if we see some actions within 3-5 years.
Edit: 2 downvotes. Cool, China just spent $1 on me or is it 10 cents. What’s the going rate?
So usually Joe Rando does not care when he is shopping, but at least he can't and doesn't fund more labor camps indirectly.
That only works if sanctions apply to slave labor, but not to comparable non-slave-labor. Sanctions based on geographic region ("Made in China"/"Made in Xinjiang") ethnicity ("Made by Uyghurs") or product category (cotton) can't achieve that, because they don't apply differential pressure that allows non-enslaving businesses to outcompete enslaving ones (and then hire former slaves as free workers), they affect both equally.
To make differential pressure work, the first step is knowing who you're dealing with, which means having dedicated inspection teams working their way down supply chains to record labor conditions on the ground. Once you do have that information, highly targeted sanctions can be used to force change.
> dedicated inspection teams
That would be a very welcome development in international labor/human rights.
At the cost of making a billion non-slave laborers also unprofitable. Sure, removing that billion from the labor pool may help other workers, but that's a huge sacrifice.
Though an improvement over blanket sanctions, I suspect the rich would use it as an excuse to squeeze more out of the poor.
Additionally, I doubt the widespread abandonment of due process will truly make the people more friendly towards the West. You'd be targeting potentially millions, and any borderline case is a PR disaster. Imagine something like "mailman for forty years loses savings due to US attack."
With the current rampant nationalism in China - likely nothing. They created a self protecting system. Especially with introduction of the social credits.
If you'd like more explanation, there is plenty at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363 and the links back from there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Red cross visited the "family camps" in Auschwitz, where everything was of course hunky-dory.
Occurrence of war based on fake allegations isn't rare in our history. We now have enough motivation to have a war against China and human rights isn't one of them. It's all about power and that's why there is so much focus on media about it.
Why nobody talks about KSA/Saudis? We have strong proof for all the terrible things they have done and they are still our dear partner. It's all BS if you ask me. Everything is about power and interest.
Travel to China and see what they are doing. China isn't an utopia, but most of the Chinese are happy about their progress. They complain about lack of freedom of speech but they also celebrate their victory in ending extreme poverty. They also have a lot of respect for western values unlike what politicians are trying to make you believe. It's pretty significant that they have order with a population of over 1.4 billion, most of whom were not educated.
The IOC claims the olympics is not about politics, which means they dont want to discuss the issue. However this is not a political issue. It is a human rights issue.
I'm interested in how CCP managed to arrest and put more than 1 million uyghurs into reeducation camp. I found that population of Xinjiang is only 25 millions. It is unbelievable that 4% of people were put into something like a jail.
Nazi Concentration camps were called essentially the same euphemisms by the German gov.
i personally have come to see cryptocurrencies as a means to escape this trend; here you have a tool that escapes that big machinery of government - never mind the electricity that is wasted along the way; i think that the altenative of a GULAG is much worse, in terms of trade-offs.
Hungary is usually considered Central Europe, and they're the only ones i can think of besides Poland and Belarus. Maybe Serbia if you're being generous?
That's far from "much of Eastern Europe ( there are 10 countries in the Balkans only).
Russia and Poland are indeed in Eastern Europe ( Russia partially), and Poland is indeed one of the biggest countries (37 million) in that part of Europe, but still has less inhabitants than the Balkans or Ukraine which certainly lack traditional autocratic governments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26630159
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26643703
If you want more, there's 7 years' worth at these links:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Mini-FAQ:
Q: But isn't this an important world situation?
A: Sure—more important than most of what's on HN. That doesn't mean that HN's rules stop applying or that flamewar becomes ok. Also, people angrily yelling on the internet has nothing to do with helping oppressed peoples. It is about activated tribal emotion, and in that sense belongs to the problem rather than any step toward solution.
Q: Are you secretly a spy, Chinese agent, communist, astroturfer, racist, or sympathizer thereof?
A: No; see step 4 of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck. The idea of HN has always [1] been to avoid becoming scorched earth [2] or at least to stave off that fate for a while longer [3]. Scorched earth is not interesting, and threads like these are unfortunately a fast road to hell.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
In any case, great work.